Mitch Podolak

Mitch Podolak is a prominent figure of the Canadian folk music community. He began his career at the Bohemian Embassy Coffee House in Toronto in the early sixties where he rose from bus boy to booking shows. He was the artistic director of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, which he founded in 1974 with Ava Kobrinsky and Colin Gorrie. In 1978 he and Gorrie with Ernie Fladell, Gary Cristall and Frannie Fitzgibbon founded the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. He has been a major contributor to festivals in Calgary, Edmonton, Canso Nova Scotia, Owen Sound and others.

In the late 1960’s, Mitch Podolak began a dynamic relationship with CBC Radio as a freelance documentary maker, working into the 1970's for such shows as Five Nights, CBC Tuesday Night, Between Ourselves and This Country In The Morning. With CBC as a resource base, Podolak developed the first Winnipeg Folk Festival in August of 1974. It was an immediate success and within a few years, Podolak created the Vancouver Folk Festival and helped the Edmonton and Calgary Folk Festival’s open their doors. It was the successful transference of the model Mitch Podolak developed in Winnipeg that lead to the pre-eminent growth of the western Canadian folk festivals.

In 1976 Podolak founded Barnswallow Records, the label that launched the career of Stan Rogers.

Podolak was the co-founder of the Winnipeg International Children’s Festival and was the originator of the idea and effort that created the West End Cultural Centre, Winnipeg’s major music venue.

For a period Mitch commuted between Victoria, BC and Canso, NS, producing a multicultural festival on the West Coast and working with Troy Greencorn to establish the Stan Rogers Folk Festival on the East Coast.

Currently Podolak operates as Executive Producer of Home Routes which is North America’s only house concert circuit.

Podolak seriously plays old time Appalachian style banjo. He also sings enthusiastically but without skill and is often heard destroying songs in half a dozen different languages. His ambitions are to age without grace, and then evolve into a curmudgeon waving a gnarled cane at children and telling them to get the fuck off his lawn.

References

• Winnipeg Folk Festival, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica-Dominion, 2010
• Vancouver Folk Music Festival, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica-Dominion, 2010
• OCFF Conference 2007 Panelists, Folk Prints (Fall 2008), the Ontario Councel of Folk Festivals

External links

• The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Winnipeg Folk Festival, History
• Vancouver Folk Music Festival History